The Blue, My God The Blue
Walking home today I was reminded of that story by Issac Azimov where, on a world in the middle of a star cluster where at least one of the six suns is always shining, a perfect eclipse event every two-thousand years causes everyone to go mad when they see the depth of the night sky for the first time. Right now the sky is having a similar effect on the people of Derry, as it is blue.
It is blue it is blue it is blue. There is not a cloud in it. Not a one. I stood on a hill and looked around; I saw no hint of cloud on any part of the horizon, even over Donegal, where clouds are born.
The heat is amazing. In the middle of the soul-gouging blue is an impossibly bright and hot thing. I'd seen it on TV, and read about it in astronomical literature, but that was no preparation for the sheer majesty of it. I am told it is the sun. I felt like falling to my knees and worshiping it. A collie dog trotted by; the urge was to sacrifice it in full view of the Bright One, and so win His favour.
But I could not catch the dog.
This is what I suppose they call "big sky", though I think that only applies to unfinished landscapes with featureless horizons, like they have out in America. This place is too hilly to have truly big sky. So we need a new way to describe a cloudless day in Northern Ireland. I suggest unlikely sky. It's the polar opposite to the sky we endure most of the time, which is a brightish blanket of unbroken grey. At times it looks like the sky has simply not yet loaded, but you wait around and it still doesn't appear, so it dawns on you that it's meant to look like that.
If ever there is anything interesting going on in the sky--an eclipse, or the peak of a meteor shower--you are guaranteed the sky will go blank like this, and the blankness will last for exactly as long as you are interested in whatever is behind it. It can wait. Sometimes it waits for weeks. A solar burp could scorch the biosphere off the rest of the planet but Derry would survive, safe under miles of cloud.
Okay. I'm going to get some ice-cream and stare at the unlikely sky.
It is blue it is blue it is blue. There is not a cloud in it. Not a one. I stood on a hill and looked around; I saw no hint of cloud on any part of the horizon, even over Donegal, where clouds are born.
The heat is amazing. In the middle of the soul-gouging blue is an impossibly bright and hot thing. I'd seen it on TV, and read about it in astronomical literature, but that was no preparation for the sheer majesty of it. I am told it is the sun. I felt like falling to my knees and worshiping it. A collie dog trotted by; the urge was to sacrifice it in full view of the Bright One, and so win His favour.
But I could not catch the dog.
This is what I suppose they call "big sky", though I think that only applies to unfinished landscapes with featureless horizons, like they have out in America. This place is too hilly to have truly big sky. So we need a new way to describe a cloudless day in Northern Ireland. I suggest unlikely sky. It's the polar opposite to the sky we endure most of the time, which is a brightish blanket of unbroken grey. At times it looks like the sky has simply not yet loaded, but you wait around and it still doesn't appear, so it dawns on you that it's meant to look like that.
If ever there is anything interesting going on in the sky--an eclipse, or the peak of a meteor shower--you are guaranteed the sky will go blank like this, and the blankness will last for exactly as long as you are interested in whatever is behind it. It can wait. Sometimes it waits for weeks. A solar burp could scorch the biosphere off the rest of the planet but Derry would survive, safe under miles of cloud.
Okay. I'm going to get some ice-cream and stare at the unlikely sky.
4 Sub-deposits:
Come visit California in the summer and we will have unlikely sky for MONTHS for you. You can have it. For free. Along with the 90-degrees-and-up, incinerate-your-brain temperature. PLEASE TAKE IT, GOD PLEASE! SEND CLOUDS!
A.Fortis ... you're bonkers. Totally whacko, off the deep end, nuts. We'd gladly send some of Glasgow's thick murky dreariness over there ... if only we could. Feel the PAIN of the dark side....
Neal: why couldn't you catch the dog? If you'd caught the dog, you might have given us MORE of this glorious thing!
The dog saw the fresh zeal in my eyes and knew better than to hang about.
I've talked to the geoengineers about moving Ireland to somewhere about thirty miles west of San Francisco but they said it was easier to build an exact replica out of landfill and move the people.
I told them, no, it has to be the original Ireland, and they suggested one solution where we traverse the Arctic (about six thousand years of cold before it would get warm again, and when we arrived Northern Ireland would in fact be to the south) and an alternative involving crossing the Atlantic and shoving the country bit-by-bit along the Panama canal.
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